Putting A Video On My Site

I just got a professional video done for my site and I am not sure where to put it. Should it be directly on my index page or lon his own page. Also the company that created it offered me to put it on their server and i would embedded on my site. I am not sure what would be the best way to rank it. Any advice would be appreciated.

Whether to host it yourself or have it hosted somewhere else depends almost entirely upon how much bandwidth you have to burn with your hosting plan as well as how much you expect the video to be viewed.

In the same situation if I had bandwidth to burn, I'd host it on my own server. Easier, cleaner and 100% control. That's not to say I couldn't also upload it to YouTube or one of the other video platforms out there to bring over traffic and gain additional exposure.

If I didn't have bandwidth to burn I'd host it on YouTube, Amazon's S3 servers or one of those other major services that have redundancy. Being careful to choose one that didn't contain additional advertising of course. You can embed those right into any page and get the page to rank well by including some text about the video's subject matter.

Thanks, this is really good info. Now when you have a video that comes up in the search results. It does not matter what site or page it is.on It will show as the video by itself not the page it is on?

Speaking of video (I'm a big believer), Matt Cutts really has some great quality videos on his blog, not talkng just content here, just quality of the video. Loads fast, looks sharp, good stuff. Wonder what he uses/how he does it?

If you are doing video in the least you should be using Youtube at least for the social networking aspects of it and the free bandwith is a plus too. Beyond that you may wish to host it yourself as they pointed out because an embedded video does not count as content on a page to Google.

I don't remember Matt laying out exactly what he uses to make his videos, but I doubt it's a huge secret. Of course I don't exactly worship at the Altar of Matt, so he may have answered the question already and I've missed it.

Depending upon what you're doing with the video (eg is it true video of someone speaking, is it a capture of something on ones desktop, etc) there are different software kits to do it. The software can have a pretty large effect, not only in capturing what you're trying to capture but in how it compresses the final video it produces. For the software many, many folks have used one called Camtasia. I've used it for years for different projects. Like most quality video capture software it gives you several different formats to choose from when producing the final video.

Beyond the software, having a decent camera and/or microphone are important in producing good quality videos. And a computer that is hefty enough to handle the data input.

I think it has a physical location on your server then whereas an embedded YouTube video is physically located on YouTube. Google recently announced some more changes to video sitemaps and I actually contacted them and left a rather long comment but it doesnt look like they liked what I said or they arent allowing comments. I basically asked them why they cant read their own videos on a site.